By Gabriel Haberberg

An engraving of a jagged promontory of land appears in the middle of the panegyric dedicated to the seventeenth-century Dutch nobleman Johan Maurits of Nassau. The text, written by the Dutch scholar Caspar Barlaeus, celebrates Maurits’ governorship of Dutch Brazil from 1636 to 1644. Yet the image itself is not entirely encomiastic.

Most of the engraving’s foreground is occupied by a rough terrain of hard rock, its unevenness emphasized by the play of shadows. The placid leeward waters of the bay are distinguished from the waters on the right, where choppy waves indicate the promontory’s windward side. The Dutch artist Frans Post, who designed the image, seems to obstruct rather than invite our entrance into this image. Why is this feature of the bay given such prominence?

The promontory was of strategic importance for Brazil’s European colonizers, even before the Dutch arrived. The reef acted as the outer barrier of a natural harbor, a fact exploited by Portuguese sailors to Brazil when they seized the land in the sixteenth century and established a port city there. They named the city Recife, after the Portuguese word “recife” for “reef.” In Post’s image, the city is blurrily pictured on the distant horizon, located between the headland in the foreground and the Brazilian mainland

The Dutch captured Recife from the Portuguese early on during their attempt to establish a Brazilian colony in the 1600s, and the town soon became their leading administrative center. Recife’s territory was expanded by the building of a new settlement, Mauritsstad, on the nearby Antônio Vaz Island, visible in Post’s image at the left edge of the horizon line. The two sites were connected by a bridge which enabled trade and the transportation of goods, primarily sugar, between them.

We learn from Barlaeus’s text that sugar was also transported to Mauritsstad in small vessels. This transport only occurred at low tide because “waves [could rock] the boat, and more than once the heavy load or sudden gusts of wind had caused them to capsize and sink.” Post made the choice to depict the harbor waters as particularly still. Through his choice, he emphasized the ideal conditions for the movement of the colony’s most vital and most devastating commercial product, which launched Dutch involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the exploitation of Black African labor.

In Post’s image, however, the focus is not on heavy industrial activity. Instead, the harbor is populated with tiny makeshift rafts calmly drifting on the water. Right behind the headland is a seated Indigenous male figure paddling on a miniscule barge. It is hardly wide enough to carry another person, let alone transport a precious commodity. The man is unperturbably headed towards Recife, depicted in the distance. Further in the water two more rafts have arrived at the entrance to the harbor, which is closely guarded by a large convoy of Dutch naval ships. The calmness of these Indigenous paddlers is contrasted with the static military might of the colonial authority originating from overseas. The population and landscape of Brazil are brought under tranquil control by Maurits’s ruling hand.

Post’s visual choices construct an image of empire where the safety and peacefulness of the harbor allow the colony to prosper. However, these same visual choices simultaneously reveal the cracks in the territory’s foundations. The horizon line that extends from Mauritsstad on the left to Recife in the center and the ships on the right, for example, offers an unbroken vision of Dutch domination of the land. Yet in depicting the entirety of the inhabited terrain at a distance, Post does not allow the viewer to inspect the colony’s internal civic operations. Moreover, the naval ships fortifying the harbor suggest not only security, but also the possibility that a maritime adversary will soon arrive to challenge the Dutch for their claim on the territory.

A student research post from the Fall 2024 graduate seminar The Mind of the Book (HSAR 620). More information and link to other research posts.